Molding

For this week I made three pieces, a well plate that failed and I use it for documenting the process of making the wax mold. A jewel, since my wellplate failed I had to come up with something quickly to get the week completed. Finally probes, as the nice final touch for my final project, and to cover their making I am using them to explain the final stage of casting plastic into the silicone mold.

This week's assignment was to design a piece to be molded and cast. Since I was inspired by our group project. I chose to design a well plate, of 92 wells that should take about 0.5ml of liquid. Purpose of it, is that I can then program the handler to pick from a source different colors of fluids and program it to mix out a rainbow, into well plates. Problem was that the silicone was too thick, and didnt reach every nook and cranny of the mold.

I figure it would take a syringe or some silicone spreader meant for construction work to ram it down the wells, so for the purpose of this assignment I had to come up with something simpler. A Jewel like thing, that would look like a massive ruby if done with transparent red.

I just randomly chose a geometric design from the net, an 8 sided thing called Rhombicuboctahedron, that I then designed as a 8 sided block in Inventor and then just made cuts to it to get the sides I wanted. This gave me a half piece I would then by using the 123D Design add 2 of them to design the model I would then mill from wax as the mold for silicone.

I got the wax mold for the jewel done, altough it was removed from the roland mill before I had a chance to run its finishing run, but the model is adequate for the purpose of making a silicon mold.

In the end making the silicone mold is not that difficult, measure the materials in the right amounts, at 100A:90B ratio, and then mix them well to ensure proper curing. You will want to use a vacuum chamer to suck out the airbubbles that got made during the mixing. Then just pour the stuff into the wax mold you made and let it sit in a well ventilated space for a day.

Since I did the silicone mold on my own, it was impossible to document the process properly. Might want to look into developing a documentation drone... Now I am ready to make the plastic casting, thinking of using dark red plastic for it, to amplify the jewel look of it.

In the end I chose to use dark green, to make it look like an emerald, but I used way too much color. The "stone " ended up looking almost black.